Recommender systems are becoming a popular tool to present a product and/or a service, i.e. an item, to a user from a vast amount of items available online, such as real products, online articles, video content and so forth, in which the user is actually likely to be interested.
In that context, European patent specification EP 1 518 407 B1 discloses a method for improving the performance of a recommender system. The performance of the recommender system is improved by updating a respective user profile in dependence of user feedback. The method only accepts feedback that does not degrade performance of the recommendation system and measures the performance of the recommendation system by an error rate. Feedback that would degrade performance is discovered without being employed to alter the user profile. The recommendation system described in EP 1 518 407 B1 is only configured to transmit recommendations directly to a user.
United States patent application publication US 2010/0042471 A1 describes a software and a hardware facility for managing the referral of electronic advertisements. The facility provides advertisements to a referrer and shall enable the referrer to forward the advertisements to recipients. The facility is supposed to track recipient responses to the forwarded advertisements, e.g., interactions with the advertisement. It is disclosed that the facility would provide incentives and/or disincentives to referrers based on recipient responses to advertisements.
International patent application publication WO 2006/104694 describes a system for member-created advertisement in a member network. A member of the member network can submit a request to the system in order to receive support from the system with respect to creating and sending an advertisement.